Thursday, October 17, 2013

Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jonathon Raymond has
resigned. He will leave the
district in December. Raymond was one of a number of national superintendents
trained by the Broad Superintendents Academy- a project of the Broad
Foundation. Michelle Rhee
serves on the advisory committee for the “Academy”. This is a significant part
of Broad and corporate guided
strategy for school “reform”.
See prior articles by Randy Shaw and Joanne Barkan, among others, on the limits of this reform movement.

The district hired Raymond, and received Broad Foundation
support, in an attempt to raise the achievement scores of public schools. However, Raymond served during the last
4 years of economic crisis while state imposed budget cuts prevented many
improvements.

Particularly divisive has been the decision to close seven
low income elementary campuses.
This strategy of closing schools in minority districts has been used by
Broad Foundation alumni in cities around the nation, including Chicago,
Philadelphia and others. The
Foundation has a guidebook for how to select and to close these schools.

No Superintendent, no leader, can be individually faulted
for failure to significantly improve scores in low income schools in a period
when the per pupil expenditures were reduced by over $1,000 per student.

Increasing student poverty, as documented by economist
Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich, among others, explains a significant part of
why U.S. in falling further behind other countries school achievement. “When you break down the various
test scores, you find that high income kids are high achievers and they are
holding their own and more.” According to Micheal Rebell the executive director of the campaign
for Educational Equity at Columbia University.

“It’s when you start getting down to schools with a majority
of low-income ids that you get the astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding
educational outcomes is not the U.S. overall, it’s the growing low income
population.”

The major approaches to improve education, as extensively
documented here, the rise of
standardized testing, attempting
to hold teachers accountable for test scores, writing new math and reading
standards (The Common Core) don’t address poverty.

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute says, “If
you take children who come to school from families with low literacy, war are
not read to at home, who have poor health, - all of these social and economic
problems- and just say that you are going to test the children and have high
expectations and their achievement will go up, it doesn’t work. “

Instead of this approach, the schools need to understand the
lives and cultures of these students, the low income majorities in many
schools.

Teacher preparation programs to prepare teachers
specifically for these schools are being shut down around the nation- including
at CSU Sacramento.